For any horror film to be truly seminal within the genre, it first has to strike the proper balance between a number of very key ingredients: story, character, style, gore, suspense, performance…The best horror films – The Exorcist, for example – master this complex recipe, including just enough of each element in relative proportion to the others. Horror is also tremendously cyclical – rotating between its country of origin (such as America or Japan), its style of villain (serial killer or supernatural force) and its selection of sub-genre (dramatic terror to gore-porn splatter-fest).

Over the past several years, the genre has trended away from its late-90's obsession with long-haired Asian dead-girls and its early-millennium love of teen-friendly drivel or bloody, Saw-inspired torture pieces. Most of the buzz these days can be heard most loudly out of France, where Alexandre Aja's success with High Tension produced not only an American film career for the talented director, but equally celebrated, French-language successors such as Inside or Frontier(s). The only problem with that statement, however, is that Inside, for all its international audience support, was the only one of the two imitators which actually deserved its praise.

The "French Recipe," at least for the moment, seems to consist of the following:

Frontier(s) – directed by Hitman helmer Xavier Gens – follows this general recipe, but ultimately fails to get the proportions right. On the surface, the film is about four friends – one of whom, Yasmine, is three months pregnant – who together rob a bank and flee to a small hostel in the French countryside. The hostel is, of course, run by a family of in-bred, cannibalistic Neo-Nazis with a cellar full of mutant children and a need for some "new blood" in the family. Enter Yasmine, who can potentially play both wife and mother, thereby ushering this family of French/German hillbillies into the realm of Frontier(s) (2). Somewhere in between, much killing, cutting, chopping, sawing, eating and shooting ensue, and from minute number five, any true genre fan could accurately guess how this will all eventually play out.

It would be easy to mistake the film for a terrifying, gory, non-American thrill ride – which many audiences quite certainly have and which, on some level, it actually is – but at the end of the day, the film lacks character, the element which made High Tension or Inside work so perfectly. There's no real time spent on making Yasmine – who like the heroine of Inside is indifferent to the baby inside her – seem at all like a sympathetic, fully-fleshed woman. Whereas Inside was fueled by a growing connection between mother and child as the horrific events intensified, Frontier(s) pays virtually no attention to the one element which makes Yasmine an interesting heroine – the maternal.

Similarly, her cohorts in crime, who arrive at the hostel in two distinct groups, might very well have the word "meat" tattooed on their forehead. They are victims from the outset, pure and simple, and knowing this, the film cares little about making the audience care. Frontier(s) forgets that the key to any great horror film is not necessarily in obscuring the identities of those who will eventually die, but in convincing us to give a damn when they do. With that in mind, if all you care about is the how — the shotguns and saw-blades; the unending buckets of red-tinted corn syrup – than certainly Frontier(s) is a film worth watching if only for that value alone.

Its real problem, though, is structure. It begins to end just as soon as it seems to end its beginning. There's no middle here. We're treated to an hour of murders and chases until anything plot-worthy happens, at which point the film decides not to explore what occurs – which might actually have been interesting – but rather to use it as an excuse to rush toward a genre-bending conclusion. Quite literally, the last five minutes of this suspense film about knives turns into an action movie about guns, and while genre-leaps such as this can often serve as artistic reminders that not everything needs to be so neatly packaged, the switch here simply doesn't work.

Overall, Frontier(s) — the biggest mystery of which is ultimately why it ends with (s) – is a shallow, but well-crafted film worthy of enjoyment, if not engagement. The horror is horrific and the suspense suspenseful, but the lack of context ultimately makes the film equal to – but never greater than – the sum of its many dismembered parts.